N. Korea summit yields scant details
Trump agrees to end military drills with South
SINGAPORE — In a day of personal diplomacy that began with a choreographed handshake and ended with a freewheeling news conference, President Donald Trump deepened his wager on North Korea’s leader Tuesday, arguing that their rapport would bring the swift demise of that country’s nuclear program.
Trump, acting more salesman than statesman, used flattery, cajolery and even a slickly produced promotional video to try to make the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, a partner in peace. He also gave Kim a significant concession: no more military drills between the United States and South Korea, a change that surprised South Korea and the Pentagon.
After hours of face-toface contact, in which Trump even gave Kim a peek inside his bulletproof presidential limousine, he said he believed that Kim’s desire to end North Korea’s seven-decade-old confrontation with the United States was sincere.
“He was very firm in the fact that he wants to do this,” Trump said at the
news conference before leaving for home. While cautioning that he could not be sure, Trump said, “I think he might want to do this as much or even more than me.”
Still, a joint statement signed by the two after their meeting — the first ever between a sitting American president and a North Korean leader — was as skimpy as the summit was extravagant. It called for the “complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula but provided neither a timeline nor any details about how the North would go about relinquishing its weapons.
The statement, which U.S. officials negotiated intensely with the North Koreans and had hoped would be a road map to a nuclear deal, was a pageand-a-half of diplomatic language recycled from statements negotiated by the North over the last two decades.
No verification clause
It made no mention of Trump’s long-standing — supposedly non-negotiable — demand that North Korea submit to complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization. It made no mention of North Korea’s missiles.
It did not even set a firm date for a follow-up meeting, though the president said he would invite Kim to the White House when the time was right.
“This is what North Korea has wanted from the beginning, and I cannot believe that our side allowed it,” said Joseph Y. Yun, a former State Department official who has negotiated with the North. “I am quite simply surprised that months of negotiations produced so little.”
North Korea’s state-run newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, commenting on the meeting, said in its Wednesday editions that Kim had told Trump that “if the U.S. side takes genuine measures for building trust,” North Korea would “continue to take additional good-will measures.”
If the outcome was short on details, it still helped replace the fears of a nuclear showdown with diplomacy. The sparse joint statement seemed almost beside the point to Trump, who said the meeting was successful because it had reduced tensions.
Trump said he had taken Kim’s measure during three hours of meetings — plus a lunch of prawns and crispy pork — and found him genuine in his desire to lead North Korea out of a spiraling confrontation with the United States.
The president claimed two immediate results from the summit. He said Kim volunteered to dismantle a facility that tests engines for ballistic missiles. For his part, the president agreed to halt joint military exercises with South Korea, part of what the South Korean government views as a bulwark of its alliance with the United States.
Trump said the exercises — he referred to them as “war games” — were costly and needlessly provocative to North Korea.
U.S. officials said the vague language in the statement did not mean the United States had softened its denuclearization demand. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is to resume negotiations with the North Koreans next week on the details.
But there is no time frame for those negotiations. And if the North Koreans refused to offer concessions under the pressure of a looming summit — one that Kim eagerly wanted — it is unclear why they would do so now, especially with Trump acknowledging it will take a long time for North Korea to disarm.
The president has pivoted almost entirely from sticks to carrots on North Korea. Before his news conference, White House aides showed a short film, which Trump had commissioned and screened for Kim on an iPad during their meeting. With a thumping soundtrack and images of the two leaders as benevolent peacemakers, the video offered an inspirational view of a thriving North Korea, if only it would forsake its nuclear weapons.
“I think he loved it,” Trump said.
Trump eyes real estate
North Korea, he said, might choose not to invest in high-speed trains and other technological marvels displayed in the film. But at the least, it should exploit its strategic location and idyllic beaches, which Trump said could be lined with hotels and condos instead of artillery batteries.
“Think of it from the real estate perspective,” the property developer-turned-president said. “South Korea and China — and they own the land in the middle.”
Trump said he raised North Korea’s humanrights abuses with Kim, though it was hardly a priority. “It is a rough situation over there,” he acknowledged, but then added, “It’s rough in a lot of places.”
At one point, Trump took a quick detour to show Kim his armored limousine, “the Beast,” which is flown around the world on a military cargo plane. Kim had to borrow a Chinese jet to get to Singapore.
For all of Trump’s showmanship, however, Yun and other diplomatic veterans who have dealt with North Korea said it was Kim who emerged from the meeting as the winner.